Preparation and manipulation of nucleic acids are critical steps for molecular biology, genetic studies and diagnostics. Although there are many existing methods for nucleic acids isolation and manipulation, they have one or more limitations. The limitations include requiring the use of hazardous chemicals, requiring extra drying steps, being difficult to automate, resulting in nucleic acids solution containing contaminants, causing DNA denaturation or not cost effective, etc. Other limitations include low yield, binding quantification and analysis. Some of the methods and limitations have been described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,523,231, 5,705,628 and 7,022,835 and WO/1984/001503. Some of the limitations have also been described in publication by Jan Kieleczawa, “DNA Sequencing II: Optimizing the Isolation, Preparation and Clean-up” 127-163. These limitations have restricted the application of the underlying methods.
The present invention was to provide a method for reversible immobilizing/binding and purifying nucleic acids as well as normalizing nucleic acids respectively, which at least partially avoids the limitations and which enables fast purification and normalization of a large number of samples.